Responding to popular calls from the Daily Mail and Nigel Farage, African leaders met in Kinshasa yesterday to discuss the growing floods crisis in the United Kingdom.

‘The images of knee-high water have shocked us all’, said Congo’s President Kabila, whose nation is currently recovering from the most brutal conflict in recorded history since the Second World War.

‘The [Daily] Mail and Mr Farage have made it clear that Britain’s international aid budget, used around the globe to combat AIDS, famine and female genital mutilation, is needed in High Wycombe.

‘Well, we can do one better’.

Governments across the continent have drawn up assistance packages to help the hundreds of Britons forced to sleep in poorly funded community centres, often for days at a time.

‘It is unimaginable’, said Kabila before the assembled statesmen in Kinshasa, ‘In Henley-upon-Thames for example, only one in twenty residents are millionaires. Imagine their insurance premiums’.

Following fears of sandbag shortages at Devon County Council, particularly of that drought-excluder kind, the Islamic Republic of Mauritania has stepped in, offering to drop several thousand sand bags ‘over a wide area’ from strategic bombers. Mauritania, a country which according the UN has between 10% and 20% of its population as slaves, was happy to help.

‘Hey, we’re in the Sahara’, said a spokesman for the ruling junta, ‘we’re basically made out of sand!’
The largest contribution has come from Eritrea. The Red Sea state, whose primary exports include nutmeg and ferrous waste, has promised to match David Cameron’s proposed flood defence fund of £700 million.

‘We are more than happy to help’, said Minister Isaias Afwerki, ‘expending our entire Gross National Product to protect Elton John’s Windsor mansion will be the honour of all Eritreans’.

Alongside state intervention, charities have moved quickly to respond. Professor David Akol of Juba University in Darfur has established Help For The Home Counties.

‘Who can put a price on a pair of waders?’ asks Akol in a moving advert currently broadcasting across the continent, ‘For just £159, a Sudanese farmer can give an IT consultant from Surrey a pair of Endura Stocking Foot Protectors. That’s just four months wages to remove dampness from someone’s life’.

Half a dozen African countries have already offered to back financial aid with boots on the ground to oversee future defences. ‘It is clear’, concluded Kabila, ‘after similar catastrophes in 2000, 2007 and now 2014 that the British government simply lacks the logistical capabilities to stop water coming indoors’.

Meanwhile Syria’s Assad today announced a cease-fire in his nation’s multi-sided civil war to allow for ‘a whip round’ for Britons who have lost their second homes.